“... middle years almost alone, Groucho rose early and shaved with an electric razor, economising the steel that others needed and pointing out that, though the shave might not be very close, he could read books while he did it. He would spend the morning working on a play with Norman Krasna – a musical, until they decided it would be better without the songs ...”

“... of war was largely with the infantry rather than the tank corps. The only tanks in The Storm of Steel are shell-shot English wrecks, ‘monsters’ which, ‘hoping to baffle the aim of our guns, took a tortuous course over the battlefield like gigantic helpless cockchafers’. Even so, it was Jünger who propounded the concept of mechanisation as the ...”

“... about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow figure: a ‘marketing man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival ...”

“... business: theirs was to pay and obey. Their leaders promised not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms ...”

“... involvement in Britain’s 5G network, and the bombardiers of Brexit – Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis, Liam Fox et al – are furious too. The industry points out that Huawei kit has already been installed in dozens of cities across the UK and to a more sophisticated standard than the US can currently provide. Ripping it all out would cost billions ...”

“... Lawrence. Arthur Lawrence’s younger brother killed his 15-year-old son by throwing a sharpening-steel at him in a fit of rage (the boy was the same age as his cousin David Herbert). Might it not have been male violence, as much as maternal discontent, that made Lawrence ‘abnormal’? Lawrence, like his father and ...”

“... paternalism’. Perhaps the jocundly pastoral, fresh-faced musicians and dancers in David Allan’s famous painting of a ‘Highland Wedding at Blair Atholl’, which is reproduced as her dust-jacket, are less idealised than one has supposed. Whatever good there was in 18th-century ways of life in Scotland – and notwithstanding the brief ...”

“... Patience Strong; ‘John’ Radclyffe Hall, but not Jan Morris; Julia Kristeva, but not Elizabeth David (nor Jane Grigson, nor even Mrs Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw deal. There is no entry on Katharine ...”

“... accusation of academic complacency. ‘Lightning, Phoenix, Arizona’ has the abrupt menace of a David Lynch dream sequence, the cardiac arrest when a previously straightforward narrative crosses the line and touches a vertiginous post-mortem truth. We need to be reminded of the ugly, petrol-breathed, epidermic floss sulking past our own windows. These ...”

“... Vera Mukhina’s pair of workers with hammer and sickle, 24.5 metres high and fashioned out of steel plates, stood on the Soviet pavilion facing Kurt Schmid-Ehmen’s eagle on the German one. At the Hayward a bronze maquette (itself nearly lifesize) stands in for Mukhina’s group and a bronze eagle from the façade of the New Reich Chancellery replaces ...”

“... both to deter and to negotiate, and to a delighted designer of posters gave the impression on a David Frost programme that if he were running the country, only Dad’s Army would stand between us and the Warsaw forces. Had it not been for defence, one old hand in the Party thought, the Tories might even have lost. But once more, helped by the continuing ...”

“... style was central to the Kennedy vision of power: the President had to take on Nixon, take on Big Steel, take on Castro, and take on Khrushchev, as personal adversaries to be vanquished in a contest of manhood. ‘Power was one,’ writes Wills, ‘power over women, power over Khrushchev.’ The case in which Kennedy’s philosophy of daring is most clearly ...”

“... was queer’, which may or may not have been true. Not all of their antics were amusing. Freud’s steel-capped boots were often used to kick in plate-glass windows and he enjoyed yelling about ‘filthy yids’ in crowded pubs. Sometimes Craxton would pretend to beat him up and he would roll in the gutter until a horrified passer-by tried to intervene. At ...”

“... an unknown woman screaming next door, been kept for eight months in solitary confinement in a tiny steel cell with no natural light, witnessed the murder of two prisoners by US guards, and been constantly and repetitively questioned about fantastical crimes for which no evidence existed, Begg received a visit from ‘Martin’, of the Foreign Office. ‘Any ...”

“... Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist historians, most prominently Ian McBride and David Livingstone, have demonstrated that the history of Ulster Presbyterianism from the 18th century is characterised by intellectual richness, an openness to science, a commitment to progress and a taste for theological heterodoxy, notwithstanding backwoods ...”